Unifying self-responsibility and solidarity in social security institutions

ABSTRACT

Welfare states and social security institutions are positioned at a nexus of the two principles self-responsibility and solidarity resulting in higher or lower social inequality. Despite historical and national particularities, it is possible to identify common tendencies in their relational developments in Europe. Here, four of them will be analysed. The analysis of these cross-national developments results in the observation that self-responsibility and solidarity are being redefined and have ultimately grown together into a strict circular logic of interdependency. This, however, assumes very different forms of self-responsibility and solidarity and thereby a different concept and nexus of both principles than was the case some 20 years ago. Dominant discourses based on dualistic concepts are much too limited to comprehend this complex nexus. Instead, the changed institutions of social security implement institutional norms that correspond to a broad concept of interdependency.

Keywords:

• institutional change
• life-course norms
• resources
• social inequality
• welfare states

Notes

1. Some countries such as the UK and Denmark hardly apply any target replacement rate.

2. In The Netherlands, due to rather technical procedures such as the de-indexation of the minimum wage from real wage growth, the basic pension as a percentage of the average gross salary decreased by 25% between 1980 and 1998.

3. In Germany for example, some 40% of men over 55 are not employed. To build up a full pension, these men would have had to enter pension-relevant employment at the age of ten. In fact, early retirement schemes play a large role in particular cohorts; however, the aim of this contribution is to analyse the logic of the old-age pension systems, not the actual pensions of current pensioners. In addition, the tendency – motivated by labour-market policies – is to abolish these exceptions, so that they are hardly relevant for future pensioners.

4. The Swedish NDC scheme is linked to minimum basic pensions and therefore different from the Italian.

5. This was not the case for women's instituted earlier labour-market exit age.

6. In the past, the minimum wage was linked to the real wage growth.

7. These costs weigh more heavily on Germany than on many other countries due to its reunification costs, which has resulted in an errant discourse about the potential sustainability and efficiency of its public pension system.

8. This is sometimes avoided in short-term cutback policies as currently in Germany, but is now observed, e.g., in the Netherlands and most substantively in southern European countries.

9. This will have particularly dramatic effects in European transition countries such as Slovakia that closely followed the reform ‘model’ (Langley 2004) favoured by the World Bank and the OECD, and where international insurance companies have conquered the newly established market in social protection (Müller 2008).

10. Or using the term ‘fully funded’ which raises connotations of ‘real cash’ in opposition to ‘politically nebulous’ rights.

11. One might think here of British policies towards the young unemployed, or of some inefficient Dutch activation programmes; see also Jensen and Pfau-Effinger (2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Frericks

Dr. Patricia Frericks is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Hamburg University. PhD at Utrecht University, Department of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, on resource flows and instituted life courses. Teaching and research at the Universities of Utrecht, Hamburg, Erfurt and London (LSE). Research focus and publications in peer-reviewed journals on institutionalisation of European societies, sociology of institutional change, comparative analysis of welfare states, social citizenship and social inequality. Patricia Frericks has been involved in several European research projects and she currently published, together with Robert Maier, the monograph ‘European capitalist welfare societies: The challenge of sustainability’ with Palgrave Macmillan.